Posts Tagged ‘Brent Green’

A seductive film with live music, the performance of “Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then” was all about two outsiders, as presented as the kick-off of the fall season of EMPAC at RPI on Friday night.

First was Leonard Wood (played by Michael McGinley), a Kentucky hardware store stock clerk who spent his spare time obsessively constructing a strange and totally bizarre house outside of Louisville that he hoped would cure his wife Mary (played by Donna K) of her terminal cancer. It didn’t work.

Second is the director himself, Brent Green, a self-taught artist/filmmaker, who actually painstakingly reconstructed Wood’s “healing house” full-scale in the backyard of his Pennsylvania home in order to use it as the set of his film. It worked magnificently.

Brent Green: Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (image courtesy of the artist)

In January, 2009, Brent Green and a small army of indie rock giants descended on EMPAC in Troy and performed a live narration, foley and improvised score to accompany a series of Green’s short animated films, including the gem God Builds Like Frank Lloyd Wright. A quintessential example of American vernacular filmmaking, the show bowled over the packed house.

This week, Brent Green returns to EMPAC to unveil his first stop-motion feature film blending live actors with wooden characters. Based on the true tale of Kentucky hardware clerk Leonard Wood, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then tells an inspiring, poignant, and darkly humorous love story of a man who built a bizarre and sprawling home for his wife by hand in the hope that it would cure her of terminal cancer. Accompanied by a stellar band of musicians that include Brendan Canty (Fugazi), Howe Gelb (Giant Sand), Catherine McRae, and others, Green uses intense narration ranging from quiet, vulnerable storytelling to cathartic fumes bordering on the evangelistic.